Why do humans make music? Theories of the evolution of musicality have focused mainly on the value of music for specific adaptive contexts such as mate selection, parental care, coalition signaling, and group cohesion. Synthesizing and extending previous proposals, we argue that social bonding is an overarching function that unifies all of these theories, and that musicality enabled social bonding at larger scales than grooming and other bonding mechanisms available in ancestral primate societies. We combine cross-disciplinary evidence from archeology, anthropology, (...) biology, musicology, psychology, and neuroscience into a unified framework that accounts for the biological and cultural evolution of music. We argue that the evolution of musicality involves gene–culture coevolution, through which proto-musical behaviors that initially arose and spread as cultural inventions had feedback effects on biological evolution because of their impact on social bonding. We emphasize the deep links between production, perception, prediction, and social reward arising from repetition, synchronization, and harmonization of rhythms and pitches, and summarize empirical evidence for these links at the levels of brain networks, physiological mechanisms, and behaviors across cultures and across species. Finally, we address potential criticisms and make testable predictions for future research, including neurobiological bases of musicality and relationships between human music, language, animal song, and other domains. The music and social bonding hypothesis provides the most comprehensive theory to date of the biological and cultural evolution of music. (shrink)

Music and language are universal human abilities with many apparent similarities relating to their acoustics, structure, and frequent use in social situations. We might therefore expect them to be understood and processed similarly, and indeed an emerging body of research suggests that this is the case. But the focus has historically been on the individual, looking at the passive listener or the isolated speaker or performer, even though social interaction is the primary site of use for both domains. Nonetheless, an (...) important goal of emerging research is to compare music and language in terms of acoustics and structure, social interaction, and functional origins to develop parallel accounts across the two domains. Indeed, a central aim of both of evolutionary musicology and language evolution research is to understand the adaptive significance or functional origin of human music and language. An influential proposal to emerge in recent years has been referred to as the social bonding hypothesis. Here, within a comparative approach to animal communication systems, I review empirical studies in support of the social bonding hypothesis in humans, non-human primates, songbirds, and various other mammals. In support of this hypothesis, I review six research fields: (i) the functional origins of music; (ii) the functional origins of language; (iii) mechanisms of social synchrony for human social bonding; (iv) language and social bonding in humans; (v) music and social bonding in humans; and (vi) pitch, tone and emotional expression in human speech and music. I conclude that the comparative study of complex vocalizations and behaviors in various extant species can provide important insights into the adaptive function(s) of these traits in these species, as well as offer evidence-based speculations for the existence of “musilanguage” in our primate ancestors, and thus inform our understanding of the biology and evolution of human music and language. (shrink)

This volume provides a broad overview of issues in the philosophy of behavioral biology, covering four main themes: genetic, developmental, evolutionary, and neurobiological explanations of behavior. It is both interdisciplinary and empirically informed in its approach, addressing philosophical issues that arise from recent scientific findings in biological research on human and non-human animal behavior. Accordingly, it includes papers by professional philosophers and philosophers of science, as well as practicing scientists. Much of the work in this volume builds on presentations given (...) at the international conference, “Biological Explanations of Behavior: Philosophical Perspectives”, held in 2008 at the Leibniz Universität Hannover in Germany. The volume is intended to be of interest to a broad range of audiences, which includes philosophers (e.g., philosophers of mind, philosophers of biology, and metaethicists), as well as practicing scientists, such as biologists or psychologists whose interests relate to biological explanations of behavior. (shrink)

Knowledge of the complexity of human communication comes from three main sources – (i) studies of the linguistics and neuropsychology of dysfunction after brain injury; (ii) studies of the development of social communication in infancy, and its dysfunction in developmental psychopathologies; and (iii) the evolutionary history of human communicative interaction. Together, these suggest the need for a broad, integrated theory of communication of which language forms a small but critical component.

Some methodological adaptationists hijacked the term “exaptation,” and took an occasion of Stephen Jay Gould’s misspeaking as confirmation that it possessed an evolutionarily “designed” function and was a version of an adaptation, something it was decidedly not. Others provided a standard of evidence for exaptation that was inappropriate, and based on an adaptationist worldview. This article is intended to serve as both an analysis of and correction to those situations. Gould and Elisabeth Vrba’s terms, “exaptation” and “aptation,” as originally introduced, (...) are very useful, unlike the faded adaptationist echo of “exaptation” devised by the methodological adaptationists, which has made the term incoherent. We will discuss how exaptation relates to function, to aptation, and to adaptation, both primary and secondary. These ideas have been rendered practically useless through their mistaken definitions and misapplications by evolutionary psychologists. (shrink)

Currently, production and comprehension are regarded as quite distinct in accounts of language processing. In rejecting this dichotomy, we instead assert that producing and understanding are interwoven, and that this interweaving is what enables people to predict themselves and each other. We start by noting that production and comprehension are forms of action and action perception. We then consider the evidence for interweaving in action, action perception, and joint action, and explain such evidence in terms of prediction. Specifically, we assume (...) that actors construct forward models of their actions before they execute those actions, and that perceivers of others' actions covertly imitate those actions, then construct forward models of those actions. We use these accounts of action, action perception, and joint action to develop accounts of production, comprehension, and interactive language. Importantly, they incorporate well-defined levels of linguistic representation. We show how speakers and comprehenders use covert imitation and forward modeling to make predictions at these levels of representation, how they interweave production and comprehension processes, and how they use these predictions to monitor the upcoming utterances. We show how these accounts explain a range of behavioral and neuroscientific data on language processing and discuss some of the implications of our proposal. (shrink)

Why should music be of interest to cognitive scientists, and what role does it play in human cognition? We review three factors that make music an important topic for cognitive scientific research. First, music is a universal human trait fulfilling crucial roles in everyday life. Second, music has an important part to play in ontogenetic development and human evolution. Third, appreciating and producing music simultaneously engage many complex perceptual, cognitive, and emotional processes, rendering music an ideal object for studying the (...) mind. We propose an integrated status for music cognition in the Cognitive Sciences and conclude by reviewing challenges and big questions in the field and the way in which these reflect recent developments. (shrink)

Talk of linguistic universals has given cognitive scientists the impression that languages are all built to a common pattern. In fact, there are vanishingly few universals of language in the direct sense that all languages exhibit them. Instead, diversity can be found at almost every level of linguistic organization. This fundamentally changes the object of enquiry from a cognitive science perspective. This target article summarizes decades of cross-linguistic work by typologists and descriptive linguists, showing just how few and unprofound the (...) universal characteristics of language are, once we honestly confront the diversity offered to us by the world's 6,000 to 8,000 languages. After surveying the various uses of “universal,” we illustrate the ways languages vary radically in sound, meaning, and syntactic organization, and then we examine in more detail the core grammatical machinery of recursion, constituency, and grammatical relations. Although there are significant recurrent patterns in organization, these are better explained as stable engineering solutions satisfying multiple design constraints, reflecting both cultural-historical factors and the constraints of human cognition.Linguistic diversity then becomes the crucial datum for cognitive science: we are the only species with a communication system that is fundamentally variable at all levels. Recognizing the true extent of structural diversity in human language opens up exciting new research directions for cognitive scientists, offering thousands of different natural experiments given by different languages, with new opportunities for dialogue with biological paradigms concerned with change and diversity, and confronting us with the extraordinary plasticity of the highest human skills. (shrink)

Our target article proposed that language production and comprehension are interwoven, with speakers making predictions of their own utterances and comprehenders making predictions of other people's utterances at different linguistic levels. Here, we respond to comments about such issues as cognitive architecture and its neural basis, learning and development, monitoring, the nature of forward models, communicative intentions, and dialogue.

Is the human tendency toward musicality better thought of as the product of a specific, evolved instinct or an acquired skill? Developmental and evolutionary arguments are considered, along with issues of domain‐specificity. The article also considers the question of why humans might be consistently and intensely drawn to music if musicality is not in fact the product of a specifically evolved instinct.

We disagree with Juslin & Vll's (J&V's) thesis that music-evoked emotions are indistinguishable from other emotions in both their nature and underlying mechanisms and that music just induces some emotions more frequently than others. Empirical evidence suggests that frequency differences reflect the specific nature of music-evoked emotions: aesthetic and reactive rather than utilitarian and proactive. Additional mechanisms and determinants are suggested as predictors of emotions triggered by music.

In my general aim to probe a non-reductionist Philosophy of Cognitive Enhancement, considering social self-other relations and the epistemic 2PP in social syn-aesthetic tuning-ins, synchronisations and tuning-outs, this paper amplifies the Aristotelian common sense concept κοινὴ αἲσθησις2 by analysing the concept and metaphor of “resonance”3 in contemporary debates on >resonance< as acoustic and multimodal figure of thought. Resonance as shown in scientific models derived from acoustics will be applied to an aesthetic comunity of sensing and making music together as explored (...) in Alfred Schütz, as well as in social relations in social psychology. Finally, this paper puts resonance to test as well in technical atunements of social relations and closes with the necessary resistance to imposition of social resonance, introduced in this paper as xenoresonance. (shrink)

The mechanisms proposed in the target article are quite general and do not address variables specific for music. I argue that reactions to music include motivational mechanisms related to functions of music. To further the field, as the authors envision, consideration of internal mechanisms must be paired with specific hypotheses that include musical and musically relevant variables.

Music is a deeply entrenched human phenomenon. In this article, I argue that its evolutionary origins are intrinsically intertwined with the incremental anatomical, cognitive, social, and technological evolution of the hominin lineage. I propose an account of the evolution of Plio-Pleistocene hominins, focusing on traits that would be later implicated in music making. Such traits can be conceived as comprising the musicality mosaic or the multifaceted foundations of musicality. I then articulate and defend an account of protomusical behaviour, drawing theoretical (...) licence from the social brain framework of Robin Dunbar and colleagues, as well as the evolutionary framework for human culture and cooperation developed by Kim Sterelny. The role of gene-culture co-evolution and niche construction is brought to the fore in articulating the evolutionary account. Finally, I defend the view that music subsequently developed via processes of social learning and cumulative culture. (shrink)

BackgroundCognitive deficits are one of the core features of major depressive disorder that play crucial role in functional recovery. Studies have explored cognitive deficits in MDD, however, given inconsistent results, especially in mild-moderate MDD. Recently, studies have explored music as cognitive ability in various clinical conditions. In MDD, large focus has been on evaluating emotion deficits and just a handful on music cognition. With growing evidence on use of music based intervention to target cognitive deficits, it is imperative to explore (...) nature of music cognitive ability in MDD.AimTo examine musical and neuro-cognitive deficits in patients with mild-moderate MDD.MethodsPatients diagnosed with mild or moderate MDD and matched healthy controls were evaluated on selected tests from NIMHANS Neuropsychological test battery and Montreal battery for evaluation of amusia.ResultsMDD group performed significantly lower than HC on working memory, verbal learning and retention. Three indices were computed for a comprehensive evaluation. Groups did not differ significantly in any of the indices- focused attention, executive function, learning and memory as well as on music cognition. Focused attention and memory index predicted music cognition in HC and the combined group. Attention alone contributed to 62.1% of variance in music cognition. Similarly, music cognition significantly predicted focused attention.ConclusionIndividuals with mild-moderate MDD show significant deficits in working memory, verbal learning and memory, however, not in music cognition. There exists a significant relationship between music cognition and attention, which could be implicated in use of music interventions to ameliorate cognitive deficits. Limitations of study include small sample size and heterogeneity. Future studies on larger cohort examining musical emotion perception and neurocognition is imperative to have deeper understanding of this debilitating condition. (shrink)

Both Mehr et al.'s credible signaling hypothesis and Savage et al.'s music and social bonding hypothesis emphasize the role of multilevel social structures in the evolution of music. Although empirical evidence preferentially supports the social bonding hypothesis, rhythmic music may enable bonding in a way uniquely fitted to the normative and language-based character of multilevel human societies.

Since its inception, Shannon's information theory has attracted interest for the study of language and music. Recently, a wide range of converging studies have shown how efficient communication pervades language, from phonetics to syntax. Efficient principles imply that more resources should be assigned to highly informative items. For instance, average information content was shown to be a better predictor of word length than frequency, revisiting the famous Zipf's law. However, in spite of the success of the efficient communication framework in (...) the study of language and speech, very little work has investigated its relevance in the analysis of music. Here, we examine the organization of harmonic information in two large corpora of Western music, one made of MIDI files directly sequenced from scores, and the other made of MIDI recordings of live performances of highly skilled piano players. We show that there is a clear positive relationship between (contextual) information content of harmonic sequences and two essential musical properties, namely duration and loudness: the more unexpected a harmonic event is, the longer and the louder it is. (shrink)

It is easy to envision marked progress in biological and physiological approaches to emotion, due to technological advances in imaging and other recording techniques. The future of social-constructionism appears more hazy: Progress will likely depend as much on new ideas as on new empirical discoveries. The most fruitful breeding ground for new ideas is where disciplines meet. Hence, the contributors to this special section represent diverse disciplines: biology, computer science, and the arts, as well as areas more traditionally associated with (...) the social construction of emotion, for example, interpersonal relations, cultural influence, and individual development. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 7, July 2022.

Religion can have an important influence in moral decision-making, and religious reminders may deter people from unethical behavior. Previous research indicated that religious contexts may increase prosocial behavior and reduce cheating. However, the perceptual-behavioral link between religious contexts and decision-making lacks thorough scientific understanding. This study adds to the current literature by testing the effects of purely audial religious symbols (instrumental music) on moral behavior across three different sites: Mauritius, the Czech Republic, and the USA. Participants were exposed to one (...) of three kinds of auditory stimuli (religious, secular, or white noise), and subsequently were given a chance to dishonestly report on solved mathematical equations in order to increase their monetary reward. The results showed cross-cultural differences in the effects of religious music on moral behavior, as well as a significant interaction between condition and religiosity across all sites, suggesting that religious participants were more influenced by the auditory religious stimuli than non-religious participants. We propose that religious music can function as a subtle cue associated with moral standards via cultural socialization and ritual participation. Such associative learning can charge music with specific meanings and create sacred cues that influence normative behavior. Our findings provide preliminary support for this view, which we hope further research will investigate more closely. (shrink)

Although music and other forms of art can develop in diverse directions, they are linked to the genetic profiles of populations. Hearing music is a strong environmental trigger that serves as an excellent model to study the crosstalk between genes and the environment. We propose that the ability to enjoy and practice music requires musical aptitude, which is a common and innate trait facilitating the enjoyment and practice of music. The innate drive for music can only have arisen by exposure (...) to music, and it develops with motivation and training in musically rich environments. Recent genomic approaches have shown that the genes responsible for inner ear development, auditory pathways and neurocognitive processes may underlay musical aptitude. It is expected that genomic approaches can be applied to musical traits and will reveal new biological mechanisms that affect human evolution, brain function, and civilisation. (shrink)

Together with language, music is perhaps the most distinctive behavioral trait of the human species. Different hypotheses have been proposed to explain why only humans perform music and how this ability might have evolved in our species. In this paper, we advance a new model of music evolution that builds on the self-domestication view of human evolution, according to which the human phenotype is, at least in part, the outcome of a process similar to domestication in other mammals, triggered by (...) the reduction in reactive aggression responses to environmental changes. We specifically argue that self-domestication can account for some of the cognitive changes, and particularly for the behaviors conducive to the complexification of music through a cultural mechanism. We hypothesize four stages in the evolution of music under self-domestication forces: (1) collective protomusic; (2) private, timbre-oriented music; (3) small-group, pitch-oriented music; and (4) collective, tonally organized music. This line of development encompasses the worldwide diversity of music types and genres and parallels what has been hypothesized for languages. Overall, music diversity might have emerged in a gradual fashion under the effects of the enhanced cultural niche construction as shaped by the progressive decrease in reactive (i.e., impulsive, triggered by fear or anger) aggression and the increase in proactive (i.e., premeditated, goal-directed) aggression. (shrink)

Schooling fish, swarms of starlings, plodding wildebeest, and musicians all display impressive synchronization. To what extent do they use acoustic cues to achieve these feats? Could the acoustic cues used in movement synchronization be relevant to the treatment of movement disorders such as Parkinson's disease in humans? In this article, we build on the emerging view in evolutionary biology that the ability to synchronize movement evolved long before language, in part due to acoustic advantages. We use this insight to explore (...) potential mechanisms that explain why music therapy has beneficial effects for PD patients. We hypothesize that rhythmic auditory cues, particularly music, can stimulate neuronal and behavioral processes that ease the symptoms and potentially the causes of PD because the neural circuits used in auditory entrainment at individual and group levels are associated with dopamine production. We summarize current treatment of PD and outline how new insights from an evolutionary perspective could improve understanding and eventual treatment of movement disorders in humans. (shrink)

In the performing arts, such as music and dance performances, people actively interact with each other and show their exciting performances. Some studies have proposed that this interaction is a social origin of the performing arts. Some have further investigated this phenomenon based on the synchronization and coordination theory. Though the majority of these studies have focused on the collaborative context, several genres of the performing arts, such as jazz sessions and breakdance battles, have a competitive context. Several studies have (...) suggested that, in this competitive context, performers actively interact with each other and construct some correspondence. Moreover, a few recent studies focusing on competitive conversations, such as debates, have shown that, compared to people's interactions in collaborative conversations, people in competitive contexts frequently coordinate their behaviors in complicated ways. However, the interaction and coordination among performers in these competitive contexts have not been sufficiently investigated. Therefore, we investigated the coordination of expert breakdancers in battle scenes and measured their rhythmic movements using a motion capture system. We calculated the relative phase of the rhythmic movements between two dancers to investigate their coordination. The results showed that the dancers' rhythmic movements tended to synchronize in an anti-phase fashion, which means that there were similarities as well as differences between the two dancers' rhythmic movements. Furthermore, this pattern of coordination changed dynamically as time elapsed, from an in-phase synchronization or leader-follower relationships to an anti-phase synchronization and then leader-follower relationships. (shrink)

How important is the influence of spatial acoustics on our mental processes related to sound perception and cognition? There is a large body of research in fields encompassing architecture, musicology, and psychology that analyzes human response, both subjective and objective, to different soundscapes. But what if we want to understand how acoustic environments influenced the human experience of sound in sacred ritual practices in premodern societies? Archaeoacoustics is the research field that investigates sound in the past. One of its branches (...) delves into how sound was used in specific landscapes and at sites with rock art, and why past societies endowed a special significance to places with specific acoustical properties. Taking advantage of the advances made in sound recording and reproduction technologies, researchers are now exploring how ancient social and sacred ceremonies and practices related to the acoustic properties of their sound environment. Here, we advocate for the emergence of a new and innovative discipline, experimental psychoarchaeoacoustics. We also review underlying methodological approaches and discuss the limitations, challenges, and future directions for this new field. (shrink)

This essay offers a new perspective on Darwin’s evolutionary theorizing on the human arts of music, poetry and rhetoric. It argues that Darwin’s theory of the human arts is primarily a theory of their effects on our emotions. Contrary to the topical understanding Darwin nowhere claimed that the music of homo sapiens sapiens used to be performed, let alone still is performed in the service of sexual success. He exclusively stipulated that some such evolutionary attractor might have shaped the vocal (...) arts of our «half-human ancestors». In the human music proper, by contrast, he sees this archaic function only persist as a cognitively vague, yet intensely felt «mental reversion to the emotions and thoughts of a long-past age», as widely unconscious and barely decodable memory traces. Read in Gouldian terms the evolved proto-human «musical arts» have thus been «exapted», i.e. lost their presumable biologically adaptive function of evolutionary origin, yet have survived this exaptation and ever since serve new communicative functions while retaining some of their archaic affective power. Moreover, the arts of rhetoric and poetry, by using the hypothetically older neural and vocal architecture of singing (with regards to linguistic prosody, meter, and cadences), coopt this «exapted» emotional power of music into the novel field of symbolic language. Darwin’s understanding of rhetoric and poetry is shown to entail not only explicit references, but also many implicit similarities both with Greek and Latin rhetoric and poetics and, more specifically, with Romanticist assumptions regarding the origin and function of poetry. (shrink)

A recently emerging view in music cognition holds that music is not only social and participatory in its production, but also in its perception, i.e. that music is in fact perceived as the sonic trace of social rela- tions between a group of real or virtual agents. While this view appears compatible with a number of intriguing music cognitive phenomena, such as the links between beat entrainment and prosocial behaviour or between strong musical emotions and empathy, direct evidence is lacking (...) that listeners are at all able to use the acoustic features of a musical interaction to infer the affiliatory or controlling nature of an underlying social intention. We created a novel experimental situation in which we asked expert music improvisers to communicate 5 types of non-musical social intentions, such as being domineering, dis- dainful or conciliatory, to one another solely using musical interaction. Using a combination of decoding studies, computational and psychoacoustical analyses, we show that both musically-trained and non musically-trained listeners can recognize relational intentions encoded in music, and that this social cognitive ability relies, to a sizeable extent, on the information processing of acoustic cues of temporal and harmonic coordination that are not present in any one of the musicians’ channels, but emerge from the dynamics of their interaction. By manipulating these cues in two-channel audio recordings and testing their impact on the social judgements of non-musician observers, we finally establish a causal relationship between the affiliation dimension of social behaviour and musical harmonic coordination on the one hand, and between the control dimension and musical temporal coordination on the other hand. These results provide novel mechanistic insights not only into the social cognition of musical interactions, but also into that of non-verbal interactions as a whole. (shrink)

There has been a recent surge of evolutionary explanations of art. In this article I evaluate one currently influential example, Brian Boyd’s recent book On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction (2009). The book offers a stimulating collection of findings, ideas, and hypotheses borrowed from a wide range of research disciplines (philosophy of art and art criticism, anthropology, evolutionary and developmental psychology, neurobiology, ethology, etc.), brought together under the umbrella of evolution. However, in so doing Boyd lumps together (...) issues that need to be separated, most importantly, organic and cultural evolution. In addition, he fails to consider alternative explanations to art as adaptation such as exaptation and constraint. Moreover, the neurobiological literature suggests current evidence of biological adaptation for most of the arts is weak at best. Given these considerations, I conclude by proposing to regard the arts instead as culturally evolved practices building on pre-existing biological traits. (shrink)

Our response takes advantage of the wide-ranging commentary to clarify some aspects of our original proposal and augment others. We argue against the generative critics of our coevolutionary program for the language sciences, defend the use of close-to-surface models as minimizing cross-linguistic data distortion, and stress the growing role of stochastic simulations in making generalized historical accounts testable. These methods lead the search for general principles away from idealized representations and towards selective processes. Putting cultural evolution central in understanding language (...) diversity makes learning fundamental in the cognition of language: increasingly powerful models of general learning, paired with channelled caregiver input, seem set to manage language acquisition without recourse to any innate “universal grammar.” Understanding why human language has no clear parallels in the animal world requires a cross-species perspective: crucial ingredients are vocal learning (for which there are clear non-primate parallels) and an intention-attributing cognitive infrastructure that provides a universal base for language evolution. We conclude by situating linguistic diversity within a broader trend towards understanding human cognition through the study of variation in, for example, human genetics, neurocognition, and psycholinguistic processing. (shrink)

In this essay, Timothy Justus reviews the book Brain and Music (2012) by Stefan Koelsch, first providing a sketch of the book’s contents, including examples of Koelsch’s empirical work from four core areas (1) musical syntax, (2) musical semantics, (3) music and action, and (4) music and emotion. Justus then proceeds to discuss the continuous nature of cognitive domains and the continuous nature of mental activity.

Vocal music and spoken language both have important roles in human communication, but it is unclear why these two different modes of vocal communication exist. Although similar, speech and song differ in certain design features. One interesting difference is in the pitch intonation contour, which consists of discrete tones in song, vs. gliding intonation contours in speech. Here, we investigated whether vocal phrases consisting of discrete pitches (song-like) or gliding pitches (speech-like) are remembered better, conducting three studies implementing auditory same-different (...) tasks at three levels of difficulty. We tested two hypotheses: that discrete pitch contours aid auditory memory, independent of musical experience (“song memory advantage hypothesis”), or that the higher everyday experience perceiving and producing speech make speech intonation easier to remember (“experience advantage hypothesis”). We used closely matched stimuli, controlling for rhythm and timbre, and we included a stimulus intermediate between song-like and speech-like pitch contours (with partially gliding and partially discrete pitches). We also assessed participants' musicality to evaluate experience-dependent effects. We found that song-like vocal phrases are remembered better than speech-like vocal phrases, and that intermediate vocal phrases evoked a similar advantage to song-like vocal phrases. Participants with more musical experience were better in remembering all three types of vocal phrases. The precise roles of absolute and relative pitch perception and the influence of top-down vs. bottom-up processing should be clarified in future studies. However, our results suggest that one potential reason for the emergence of discrete pitch–a feature that characterises music across cultures–might be that it enhances auditory memory. (shrink)

The relationship between musical and linguistic skills has received particular attention in infants and school-aged children. However, very little is known about pre-schoolers. This leaves a gap in our understanding of the concurrent development of these skills during development. Moreover, attention has been focused on the effects of formal musical training, while neglecting the influence of informal musical activities at home. To address these gaps, in Study 1, 3- and 4-year-old children ( n = 40) performed novel musical tasks (perception (...) and production) adapted for young children in order to examine the link between musical skills and the development of key language capacities, namely grammar and phonological awareness. In Study 2, we investigated the influence of informal musical experience at home on musical and linguistic skills of young pre-schoolers, using the same evaluation tools. We found systematic associations between distinct musical and linguistic skills. Rhythm perception and production were the best predictors of phonological awareness, while melody perception was the best predictor of grammar acquisition, a novel association not previously observed in developmental research. These associations could not be explained by variability in general cognitive functioning, such as verbal memory and non-verbal abilities. Thus, selective music-related auditory and motor skills are likely to underpin different aspects of language development and can be dissociated in pre-schoolers. We also found that informal musical experience at home contributes to the development of grammar. An effect of musical skills on both phonological awareness and language grammar is mediated by home musical experience. These findings pave the way for the development of dedicated musical activities for pre-schoolers to support specific areas of language development. (shrink)

Music is a natural human expression present in all cultures, but the functions it serves are still debated. Previous research indicates that rhythm, an essential feature of music, can enhance coordination of movement and increase social bonding. However, the prolonged effects of rhythm have not yet been investigated. In this study, pairs of participants were exposed to one of three kinds of auditory stimuli (rhythmic, arrhythmic, or white‐noise) and subsequently engaged in five trials of a joint‐action task demanding interpersonal coordination. (...) We show that when compared with the other two stimuli, exposure to the rhythmic beat reduced the practice effect in task performance. Analysis of the behavioral data suggests that this reduction results from more temporally coupled motor movements over successive trials and that shared exposure to rhythm facilitates interpersonal motor coupling, which in this context serves to impede the attainment of necessary dynamic coordination. We propose that rhythm has the potential to enhance interpersonal motor coupling, which might serve as a mechanism behind its facilitation of positive social attitudes. (shrink)

Following in a psychological and musicological tradition beginning with Leonard Meyer, and continuing through David Huron, we present a functional, cognitive account of the phenomenon of expectation in music, grounded in computational, probabilistic modeling. We summarize a range of evidence for this approach, from psychology, neuroscience, musicology, linguistics, and creativity studies, and argue that simulating expectation is an important part of understanding a broad range of human faculties, in music and beyond.

What was the role of music in the evolutionary history of human beings? We address this question from the point of view that musicality can be defined as a cognitive trait. Although it has been argued that we will never know how cognitive traits evolved (Lewontin, 1998), we argue that we may know the evolution of music by investigating the fundamental cognitive mechanisms of musicality, for example, relative pitch, tonal encoding of pitch, and beat induction. In addition, we show that (...) a nomological network of evidence (Schmitt & Pilcher, 2004) can be built around the hypothesis that musicality is a cognitive adaptation. Within this network, different modes of evidence are gathered to support a specific evolutionary hypothesis. We show that the combination of psychological, medical, physiological, genetic, phylogenetic, hunter–gatherer, and cross-cultural evidence indicates that musicality is a cognitive adaptation. (shrink)

Today, music is ubiquitous, highly valued in all known cultures, playing many roles in human daily life. The ethnographic study of the music of extant human foragers makes this quite apparent. Moreover, music is ancient. Sophisticated bird-bone and ivory flutes dated from 40 kya reveal an even earlier musical-technological tradition. So is music likely to be an entrenched feature of human social life during the long passage to behavioral modernity—say, by 150 kya—or earlier? In this article I sketch an evolutionary (...) model that focuses on hominin vocal musicality and communication in the Pleistocene, tracking between series of phenotypes and changes in ecological, social, cognitive, and informational contexts. The model links musicality and protomusic to a bigger picture of hominin socio-cognitive evolution, making some connections clearer, motivating further theorizing and the search for new evidence. (shrink)